Telecommunications is a rapidly growing industry that affects almost every other major industry. Because of the field's rapid growth, the management of telecommunications systems has become more difficult as the systems have become increasingly larger and more complex. In addition to the problems of monitoring any distributed network, modern telecommunications systems include components with multiple line cards and shelves, embedded intelligent systems, and other complexities making them difficult to monitor. All of these components must be monitored for operational and business-related reasons.
Traditional methods for monitoring these complex, distributed telecommunications systems have proven unsuccessful. Recently, behavioral modeling has been employed to improve monitoring systems. However, even these methods are not able to monitor, log and analyze resource use and failures with the desired accuracy. These methods are limited to modeling physical equipment in the field and unduly restrict relationships between resources so that real-world systems cannot be accurately modeled.